Benefits of EC2

Amazon EC2 offers many advantages, making it a popular choice for businesses and developers alike. In this section, we will be discussing the key benefits of Amazon EC2 and its merits to understand how it can transform your application and revolutionize the way you build, deploy, and scale in the cloud.

Figure 1.1 – Benefits of EC2

• Cost efficiency: One of the most compelling benefits of EC2 is the cost efficiency. With a pay-as-you-go pricing model, users only pay for the computing resources they use, eliminating the need for upfront investments in hardware or long-term commitments. This model simply allows organizations to adjust their computing resource flexibly to match their actual demand without pre-planning extensively, as is required for purchasing traditional servers. Additionally, Amazon EC2 offers several pricing options such as On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, and Spot Instances, each with its own set of advantages and use cases. On-Demand Instances allow you to pay for an hour or second, with no long-term commitments, while Reserved Instances let you reserve an instance for a specific period (say, one or three years) at a discounted price. Spot Instances, on the other hand, enable you to bid for unused EC2 capacity and can provide significant cost savings for workloads that can tolerate interruptions.
• Scalability and flexibility: Another key advantage of Amazon EC2 is its ability to allow users to quickly scale their resources up or down based on demand. This benefit is particularly useful for businesses that experience fluctuating workloads or seasonal peaks in traffic. It enables them to handle these situations without overprovisioning or underutilizing resources.

  Amazon EC2 also offers a wide array of instance types, with each of them designed to cater to specific workload types, such as memory optimized or compute-intensive tasks. This makes it very flexible for users to choose the most suitable instances for their needs, ensuring optimal performance and cost efficiency.

• High availability and reliability: Amazon EC2 is built on top of a highly available infrastructure, ensuring a highly available and reliable computing environment for applications hosted in the cloud. Inside a region, there are multiple data centers clustered together to form an availability zone, and there are multiple availability zones in the region. This similar setup is spread across different geographic regions (see AWS Global Infrastructure at https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/), enabling EC2 to provide redundancy and fault tolerance ensuring that your application remains up and running even in the face of hardware failures or other issues.

  Furthermore, Amazon EC2 also offers advanced features such as auto-scaling and Elastic Load Balancing, which help distribute incoming traffic and automatically scale instances based on predefined conditions. All these features not only improve the availability and reliability of your application but also help you maintain optimal performance as your workloads change.

• Security: Security is a top priority for EC2. The platform provides several built-in features and tools to help you safeguard your data and applications. For example, with Amazon VPC, you can create a private and isolated section of the AWS cloud. This allows you to launch EC2 inside the custom network with custom network access control lists.

  Additionally, EC2 offers features, such as security groups, that allow you to control inbound and outbound traffic to your instances and securely access them using SSH or RDP. Furthermore, you can augment additional access control to your EC2 instances with AWS identity and access management (IAM) to ensure that only authorized personnel can access your EC2 resources. It is also important to recognize that AWS adopts a shared responsibility model for security. In this paradigm, AWS is responsible for securing the underlying cloud infrastructure that supports cloud services, including the physical security of data centers, networking, and the virtualization layer, while customers are responsible for protecting their data, identity and access policies, and application-specific security settings. This shared responsibility model basically allows AWS to lay the foundation for securing the cloud environment while customers have the flexibility and responsibility to enforce their security constraints for their cloud deployments.

• Ease of management: Amazon EC2 simplifies the management of your computing resources, allowing you to focus on your business tasks rather than spending time on maintaining your infrastructure. AWS offers a multitude of interfaces, such as the management console, CLIs, or SDKs, to easily monitor your instances, including launching, stopping, and terminating them as needed.

  Additionally, Amazon EC2 supports purpose-driven services such as Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring, which allows you to monitor your instances and set alarms based on specific metrics such as CPU utilization or freeable memory. These alarms can help you to proactively address performance issues or identify opportunities for optimization.

  Amazon EC2 also supports the automation of resource management through AWS services such as AWS CloudFormation. This allows you to define and manage your infrastructure as a code, making it easy to deploy, update, and version your resources. This automation also extends to patch management with the AWS Systems Manager (SSM), which simplifies the process of applying patches and updates to your EC2 instances and other resources.

• Integration with other AWS services: Amazon EC2 seamlessly integrates with a wide array of other AWS services, providing you with a comprehensive and flexible ecosystem to support your applications. For example, you can store your application data on object storage services such as Amazon S3, block storage services such as Amazon EBS, or a relational database service such as Amazon RDS. Furthermore, you can leverage the superior kin of Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, for serverless computing.

  Integration with other AWS services enables you to build powerful, end-to-end solutions that leverage the full potential of the AWS cloud. This can lead to increased productivity, reduced operational complexity, and lower costs.

• Support for various operating systems and processor architectures: Selecting the ideal operating system or processor architecture for an application can often be challenging, but not when using Amazon EC2, which offers an extensive list of options that cater directly to those needs. Well-known options such as Linux, macOS, and Windows and architectures such as x86 or ARM being available on the platform give users greater variety in choosing what best suits their requirements without worrying about modifying their entire application framework to meet specifications. This allows for smooth functionality with ease across all selections!
• Support from global infrastructure: Amazon EC2 is widely supported across multiple regions and availability zones (see AWS Global Infrastructure at https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/). This broad geographical support allows you to deploy your applications in closer proximity to your end users. This closer proximity provides a better user experience by reducing latency when a user accesses your application, thereby increasing the overall customer satisfaction.

  Furthermore, when you deploy your application across multiple regions and availability zones, you build a very highly available and fault-tolerant system, ensuring that your service remains operational in the face of any infrastructure failures or other regional issues.

• Robust security and compliance: Security is a top priority for AWS, and Amazon EC2 is not an exception. The platform offers various features and tools that can help guard the security posture of your application and data. You can use Amazon VPC to create an isolated network in the cloud and host your application inside your network perimeter. This allows your application to remain accessible only to authorized users and systems. Additionally, you can further improve your instance security posture by configuring security groups and network access control lists to define granular access to your instances.

  Amazon EC2 also supports integration with AWS IAM, allowing you to further enhance access control to your EC2 resources by defining permissions and policies for the users and groups who are accessing your resources. You can apply the principle of least privilege with IAM, ensuring that your users have the minimum necessary access to perform their tasks on your EC2 resources.

  Furthermore, it also gives us enormous confidence that AWS will continuously monitor our infrastructure and services to maintain its compliance in accordance with industry standards and certifications such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS. This allows us to build applications on EC2 that meet our organizations’ regulatory requirements and maintain a strong security posture.

• Continuous improvement: Just subscribe to the AWS blog’s RSS feed and you will be delightfully bombarded by the constant updates on exciting new features and new announcements every single day! Amazon EC2 greatly benefits from this continuous improvement effort by AWS and ensures its platform always stays up to date with the latest technologies and best practices. Specific to EC2, AWS regularly introduces new instance types and performance enhancements, allowing you to take advantage of them for your applications hosted inside EC2. For example, EC2 support for powerful instance types that leverage cutting-edge hardware such as ARM processors and GPUs enables you to run high-performance workloads, such as machine learning and scientific simulation, at a lower cost.

Note

More on ARM processors and GPUs will be covered in Chapter 4, Choosing the Right Amazon EC2 Instance Type and Size.

So, by choosing Amazon EC2 as your computing platform, your application can benefit from AWS’s ongoing innovation and commitment to excellence, ensuring that your applications are running on a state-of-the-art platform that evolves with your needs.

In summary, the benefits we discussed highlight that EC2 is a powerful and flexible computing platform for businesses and developers, making it a compelling choice for building and deploying applications in the cloud. Embracing these benefits allows EC2 to help you unlock the full potential of cloud computing, driving more innovation and, of course, amplifying the IT transformation of your organization.

As we delve further into this chapter, we will dive deeper into why EC2 outshines traditional hosting solutions and what values it brings to your plate. Let’s continue to explore how EC2 fundamentally reshapes the landscape of hosting services.